He seems to have misplaced it in the intervening five years: “My Soul to Take,” his first feature since, is a thoroughly dreary, by-the-numbers exercise. Maybe he was preoccupied by “Scream 4,” due out next spring.

The relevant number in “Soul” is seven, which, after a labored, overly long set-up, is the quota of teenagers that a long-dead schizophrenic psycho killer is scheduled to carve up before the movie can end. Mr. Craven follows his usual recipe of comic pop-culture references and dreamy shocks, but his heart doesn’t seem to be in either. Only a few fleeting images — a victim who had been thrown into a river suddenly appearing in a restroom mirror, mutely reaching out from his watery grave; a girl being dragged down an embankment, her arms spread like an angel — have the old Craven poetry.

The story is in the overly complicated vein that this genre prefers: each of the seven teenagers, born the night the killer died (or did he?), has inherited one aspect of his fractured personality. But the revelations, when they come, don’t register as either creepy or funny.

One thing that does, depending on your point of view, is that the schizoid killer is played — complete with alternating voices for his good and bad sides — by the stage star Raúl Esparza. “My Soul to Take” is a long way from Sondheim, Mamet and Pinter, but perhaps Mr. Esparza was able to draw on an earlier Broadway role: Riff Raff in the “The Rocky Horror Show.” (Whether that’s creepy or funny is up to the viewer.)